“Medicine is my wife and Science is my mistress,” said Dr. Rush.  I do not think that the breach of the seventh commandment can be shown to have been of advantage to the legitimate owner of his affections.  Read what Dr. Elisha Bartlett says of him as a practitioner, or ask one of our own honored ex-professors, who studied under him, whether Dr. Rush had ever learned the meaning of that saying of Lord Bacon, that man is the minister and interpreter of Nature, or whether he did not speak habitually of Nature as an intruder in the sick room, from which his art was to expel her as an incompetent and a meddler.

All a man’s powers are not too much for such a profession as Medicine.  “He is a learned man,” said old Parson Emmons of Franklin, “who understands one subject, and he is a very learned man who understands two subjects.”  Schonbein says he has been studying oxygen for thirty years.  Mitscherlich said it took fourteen years to establish a new fact in chemistry.  Aubrey says of Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation, that “though all his profession would allow him to be an excellent anatomist, I have never heard of any who admired his therapeutic way.”  My learned and excellent friend before referred to, Dr. Brown of Edinburgh, from whose very lively and sensible Essay, “Locke and Sydenham,” I have borrowed several of my citations, contrasts Sir Charles Bell, the discoverer, the man of science, with Dr. Abercrombie, the master in the diagnosis and treatment of disease.  It is through one of the rarest of combinations that we have in our Faculty a teacher on whom the scientific mantle of Bell has fallen, and who yet stands preeminent in the practical treatment of the class of diseases which his inventive and ardent experimental genius has illustrated.  M. Brown-Sequard’s example is as, eloquent as his teaching in proof of the advantages of well directed scientific investigation.  But those who emulate his success at once as a discoverer and a practitioner must be content like him to limit their field of practice.  The highest genius cannot afford in our time to forget the ancient precept, Divide et impera.

“I suppose I must go and earn this guinea,” said a medical man who was sent for while he was dissecting an animal.  I should not have cared to be his patient.  His dissection would do me no good, and his thoughts would be too much upon it.  I want a whole man for my doctor, not a half one.  I would have sent for a humbler practitioner, who would have given himself entirely to me, and told the other—­who was no less a man than John Hunter—­to go on and finish the dissection of his tiger.

Sydenham’s “Read Don Quixote” should be addressed not to the student, but to the Professor of today.  Aimed at him it means, “Do not be too learned.”

Do not think you are going to lecture to picked young men who are training themselves to be scientific discoverers.  They are of fair average capacity, and they are going to be working doctors.